Ouch, this is really worrying and scary. i had heard in the past about trojans that could be installed on your mobile device just by tapping on the preview of an image within a whatsapp conversation to view it in full, which were mostly used by the judicial authorities to put the phones of some suspects under surveillance.
reading these articles makes me want to go back to the old and beloved dumbphone (whose battery lasted a week, by the way).
-snip - I know WhatsApp to download image automatically as long as one has data connection, how then can one avoid it being downloaded? it's very scary at this point because I use WhatsApp and the images are just downloaded without ones permission.
This is indeed a good question : anyone has a clue?